dothack: WILL THE OLD MAN CHANGE
by BPin
Summary: We reflect on the life of an old man who acts as a security guard during the WNC Winter General Meeting. Little does he know that he must change with the world.


.hack//WILL THE OLD MAN CHANGE  
  
January, 2003.  
  
A security guard brushes his hair with intricate precision in front of a restroom mirror, trying to look as clean as possible. He was an old man, but this was his responsibility, from the day his mother bore him, to be as warm, inviting, and pleasing to the eyes as possible. He lived in the United States; the US being an important country because it is home to New York, which in turn, is home to the United Nations Headquarters. But this man, meekly named Gerald, has an important reason to be as respectable as possible: that day was the first meeting of the World Network Council. The WNC Winter General Meeting, as they had called it, was the gathering of different powerful countries around the world who had joined the WNC, as all countries with Internet environments were supposed to, according to United Nations doctrine.  
  
Gerald, personally, knew nothing much about the Internet. He was often intimidated by the multi-faced representatives of the various countries that make up the world as he gave them entrance, because they all signified the end of an old era; the time that Gerald had lived his whole life. It was ironic; Gerald was a security guard, a wizened one, who was a symbol of great authority, in at least the United Nations HQ. But it was a facade of a job, and Gerald was still nothing more than a proletariat.  
  
But what Gerald represented, what his own time taught him, was that the old lived for the benefit of the young. As he grew into an old man, Gerald could never adapt to the new teaching; the hard-working live for the benefit of the powerful. In his mind, Gerald, and all who lived strictly for the benefit of the young, were in the right and most deserving of praise, as they always would be.  
  
It was a boring affair which lasted several hours. Gerald groomed himself to spotless perfection, but no one had bothered care whether or not he was a dirty animal. The old man was a bit depressed at this. He had planned to be at his apartment abode several hours ago, but he took the overtime he earned for safeguarding...a hallway, a mere hallway...for the duration of the WNC Winter General Meeting. He looked into his old fashioned pocket watch, which bore an old photograph of his parents, dearly departed long ago. He so dearly wished to ask them why he was wasting his life away. Gerald the security guard left the affair after it was over, guaranteeing a pretty additional sum onto his paycheck, but sacrificing a moment in his cold, lonely home to meditate on his life...and why the world had grown so foolish and inconsiderate.   
  
He lived at the top of a small apartment building, built amidst a dirty ghetto.   
  
But the sky was ablaze, to the disbelief of Gerald the security guard and his neighbors, by the time he had made his way home, on foot. It seems that there was a fire, originating from the building's rooftop, quickly ascending its way to the streets. Gerald begged his landlord for details; it seemed that the fire started merely an hour before, the time Gerald would have been in a deep slumber, no doubt entranced in an dream of the southern goldenrod savannas he left behind, as a younger man, that he would have struggled against life and limb to merely wake from.   
  
But now, fate, and the World Network Council, deprived Gerald the security guard of the reverie which would have been fatal to him. The grimy studio apartment he knew as his shelter, filled to the brim with relics of his past, from his weathered zoot suits to his first photographs, now burned into the heavens.  
  
Gerald realized now, that his past existed within him, and that to further live on in the future, to continue to make himself of benefit to the children his generation left behind, he must adapt. A new world awaited old Gerald, the security guard, but in the coming years, things would change for everybody.  
  
***  
.hack TM and © 2001-2003 BANDAI 


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